I had a vague intention of writing in this issue’s column about the
decline in stage photography, and how difficult it usually is to
accompany the reviews in Theatre Record with pictures that actually
give you a sense of what the production looked like, as opposed to
simple portraiture of the main players. Then I realised that I
would be writing this column a few hours before voting begins in the
UK’s general election, and it became apparent that a far more pressing
decline is in prospect. As Michael Billington observes in the
blog article quoted opposite, whatever colour (or colours) the next
government consists of, it is all but certain that arts funding will
take a beating And it should be clear that these cuts will not
just be brutal in their extent, but the behaviour of brutes.

Bogus

One of the comments to Michael’s blog makes the age-old claim: “The
arts will survive for a few years with cuts to funding. The
elderly and the sick will not!!!” [sic] And, as others observe,
it seems unarguable. But far from it: in actuality, it is
fundamentally bogus. It does not compare like with like,
implicitly balancing as it does the airy generality of “the arts” with
the individual lives of “the elderly and the sick”. If we compare
generality with generality, of course the elderly and the sick will
survive as a category, in exactly the same general sense as “the arts”
will. Cut arts funding and individual productions/projects/venues
etc may collapse or never come to fruition, but artistic endeavour will
continue. Cut health funding – even to zero – and individual
people will die, but people as a whole will continue to grow old and to
get sick. Of course, they may be sick in ways that can’t (or
can’t reasonably) be cured and so their cases won’t repay attention
either financially or electorally... just as the artworks that emerge
under funding cuts may well be of lesser quality. But, considered
as a generality, “the elderly” and “the sick” would not simply survive
under funding cuts – they would thrive. Of course, no politician
would ever dare make such an argument because it would seem... yes...
brutal to too many voters.

Another commenter casts the net more widely, but in almost the same
terms: “Its [sic] simple, the arts can and will survive with little or
no funding. Science, technology, education and health care will
not.” That, at least, does balance one generality against
others. And yet that in itself weakens the implicit claim that
some areas of human and intellectual endeavour inherently require
funding whereas others don’t. Why will people be less likely to
work in those other areas without subsidy than in the arts? Will
there be less personal motivation felt by individuals to forge their
paths in those endeavours? I don’t think so – less careerism,
perhaps, but no less vocation. The only reason I can see would be
if they considered funding to be their right, which is a neat reversal
of an all-too-frequent prejudice about arts luvvies. They may, of
course, achieve less in their work without funding, just as the arts
will, but the claim wasn’t made about achievement but about survival,
and in that respect there’s simply no difference between the arts and
those other fields. Once again, though, no politician would dare
make an equal case, because – in another neat reversal – caring
remotely as much about the arts as about science and technology (never
mind health and education) is seen as somehow philistine.

Cowardice

This is the same cowardice as that which I indicated a few issues ago
in plays about the increase in electoral appeal of the far right in
Britain. Every play, like every politician, bases their
position on the assumption that (in the words of Jo Caird on her
theatre blog) “The people tempted to vote for the BNP have real and
valid grievances that no one else appears to be addressing”.
No-one dares question the validity of these grievances, or to say that
the reason other people get ahead in welfare queues is because they’re
needier, or that the reason “local” people aren’t given priority is
because there’s an obligation to all
people in an area. The thing is that rights apply to
everybody, including people we may not approve of, and have to be
applied equally. But there’s neither political, commercial nor
empathic audience capital in telling your listeners they’re wrong not
just morally – for giving their grievances such bigoted forms of
expression – but in point of fact. Mick Gordon’s script for
Pressure Drop largely exhibits
the same timidity, except for a couple of passing lines in which the
character of Mick explodes against Tony’s bigotry by, among other
things, telling him to just go out and get – or even create – a bloody
job himself. The most cogent rebuttal of “valid grievances” that
I’ve heard has been by comedian Marcus Brigstocke: “They’re not ‘taking
our jobs’, they’re DOING our jobs!” That’s the sort of wisdom
that has got Brigstocke cast as King Arthur in the tour of Spamalot!

Priorities

If you navigate on the Guardian’s web site to the article in which
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg praises “My hero Samuel Beckett”
(published in the newspaper on 1 May), you’ll read Clegg’s recollection
that “My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in
Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape. […] Since
then I must have read Waiting For
Godot – of course – a hundred times.” Wait a second: he
encountered Beckett’s work as an actor,
but he talks entirely in terms of reading
this great play? Not a word about the double run of the
recent West End production of it, or any other, of any other
play. What kind of a sense of priorities or perspective does that
suggest?

I wish at this point that I could quote a pithy remark of my own about
Clegg’s performance in a production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which I saw at
the 1988 National Student Drama Festival. Alas, that year’s
issues of the Festival magazine Noises
Off include only one review of the show, it’s not by me and it
doesn’t even mention Clegg... At the time of writing, it remains
to be seen how many other reviews he’ll be getting in the next few
years.